Argelia Laya

Argelia Mercedes Laya López was born on 10 July 1926 on a cacao plantation in San José del Río Chico, in the state of Miranda, Venezuela to Rosario López and Pedro María Laya. She was the third child in a family of four siblings and of Afro-Venezuelan heritage. Her upbringing could be the initial spark that started Laya’s in equality and rights for all people. Laya’s parents would teach her along with her three brothers the importance of equality, to be proud of who they were, Afro-decedents, and to not feel shame or let themselves be discriminated against. Because her father took part in armed movements against the dictator Juan Vicente Gómez, he was imprisoned several times and finally banished from Miranda in 1936.Her father would later die that year leaving the family to face financial hardships of their own.At that time, the family, moved to Caracas and Laya entered the Normal School of Caracas. While still in school, she founded the Center for Student Novelist and used it as a platform to argue for women's right to education, and social and political equality. She formulated her ideas into a national plan establishing principles and strategies to eliminate gender discrimination. She graduated with her teaching degree in 1945 at the age of 19.

That same year, a coup d'etat overthrew President Isaías Medina Angarita's regime and Laya was sent to La Guaira to work on a literacy campaign. In 1946, Laya co-founded the National Union of Women Organization (Spanish: Organización de la Unión Nacional de Mujeres) and served as the secretary of the organization through 1958. She called for debates and urged that women be granted suffrage. During her early years of teaching, Laya had a child and as an unmarried mother was suspended from teaching for her immorality. Writing a letter of protest to the Education Minister, Luis Beltrán Pietro Figueroa, she put forth her right to be unmarried and have a child and her right not have biases prevent her from seeking services for her child from organizations like child care and health care facilities. After several months, she was allowed to return to teaching, but became more vocal about the ways in which women faced discrimination. Recognizing that it wasn't just teachers who were barred from their jobs but that pregnant students were also suspended from school, Laya pressed for reforms so that all citizens universal right to education was recognized.

Laya also organized the Women’s Committee of the Patriotic Board (Spanish: Comité Femenino de la Junta Patriótica) and served in te Legion of Women Nationalists (Spanish: Legión de Mujeres Nacionalistas). Teaching classes in mental health she advocated for protecting the sexual and reproductive rights of women, advocating for both safe pregnancies and abortions. Laya was one of the earliest Venezuelan women to advocate for abortion rights and decriminalization of the procedure. Laya would later become majorly involved in these issues during her time as a board member of the Venezuelan association for alternative sexual education and defense of the violated women. She became Assistant Secretary of the Venezuelan Teachers Federation and an active collaborator with the Board of Directors of the Association of Journalists and Writers in the capital of Vargas. Lara also served as Vice Chancellor at the Victor Camejo Oberto Popular University.

In the 1950s, Laya joined the Communist Party of Venezuela (which was quite influenced by the Cuban Revolution and would be used as a model by the Venezuelans) in opposition of the President Marcos Pérez Jiménez. Two years later, she married and subsequently had three more children. By 1959, in response to the political problems in the country, she had joined the Communist Party's guerrilla groups and operated as Commandant Jacinta. For six years, she participated in guerrilla activities as part of the underground. In the late 1960s, she served as vice president of the First Congress of Venezuelan Women. Advocating for workplace protections including maternity leave and child care centers, the Congress helped to formulate laws to protect the health and employment environments of the working class. Towards the end of her time with the guerrilla group, she become more passionate towards advocating for disadvantaged people’s (women, minority and working class) rights instead of fighting for military and political Power over Venezuela. In the early 1970s, she joined a splinter group of the communist party, which split off and formed the Movement to Socialism (MAS). As one of the founders, Laya was the first woman to occupy such a high position in any political party in Venezuela. But before the “split off”, Laya attended a fair hosted by the French communist party (she was still identifying as a communist at that time) in which she was able to travel through Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and the Soviet Union. In this trip, she discovered that the problem of machismo was not only existent in Latin culture but a world-wide phenomenon. Work pay inequality in these countries, as well as in her own, was a major issue Laya would strongly advocate for. The year 1970 would prove to serve as a year of change in regards to her political views as she ended a 20 year long communist affiliation to turn towards socialism. As women's secretary of the new party, she pressed for a code of ethics to be established for the protection of workers, laws to prohibit violence against women, and pushed for regulations to prevent discrimination and injustices toward Afro-Venezuelans and other minorities, peasants, and women.

In the 1980s, Laya served on the Women’s Advisory Commission to the Presidency of the Republic and was an advisor to the Transcultural Institute of Studies of Black Women. In 1982, she took part in the civil code reforms to eliminate discrimination in adoption procedures to protect both mothers and children's rights. In 1985, she was selected to attend the United Nation’s Third World Conference on Women, held in Nairobi, Kenya as the Venezuelan delegate. During the decade, she also served as Venezuela's representative at the Inter-American Commission of Women and was part of the women's health initiative undertaken by the government. In 1988 Laya unsuccessfully ran as an MAS candidate for governor of the state of Miranda and two years later, became party president. With this accomplishment, she earned the title of the first woman and first of African descent (Afro-Latina/Afro-Venezuelan) to obtain such position. In 1994 she attended the First Meeting to Discuss Women and Education in Bolivia. There, she helped draft a program for eliminating sexism through education. The plan called for gender issues to become integral parts of study and dialogue throughout the entirety of one's education.

Laya died on 27 November 1997 in Caracas at the age of 71. Throughout Venezuela, there are programs and policies related to gender equality that bear her name. Some of these programs exist within the Windward Territorial Polytechnic University and the Feminist Formation Plan of the Socialist Training School for Gender Equality.

A famous quote of Laya is “Lucharemos por nuestros derechos y los de nuestra patria, porque el problema de la igualdad de la mujer es el problema de la liberación de los pueblos” or in English it would be translated to “We will fight for our rights and those of our country, because the problem of the equality of women is the problem of the liberation of the peoples”.